South Carolina Healthcare Voices

The House voted Friday to block funding for the health care law in several ways – starting the countdown to the defunding clash with Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama.

As expected, it approved Rep. Denny Rehberg’s amendment to the continuing resolution, which bans all payments to “any employee, officer, contractor, or grantee of any department or agency” to implement the law.

The Montana Republican’s amendment is aimed at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Labor Department.

But it also gave unexpected victories to Steve King of Iowa, approving broader measures to deny any implementation funds in the continuing resolution and block salaries to enforce the entire law.

And it approved another measure by Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri to block funding for the Internal Revenue Service to enforce the individual mandate – the wildly unpopular requirement for everyone to get health coverage starting in 2014.

None of the measures completely “defund” the health care law, because large sums of money are out of the reach of the spending bill. King lost an earlier bid, as expected, to cut off the roughly $105 billion that’s automatically appropriated under the law. It was struck down on a point of order, because it was considered legislating on an appropriations bill.

But taken together, they could add one more element of tension to the growing prospect of a government shutdown. That’s becoming a more realistic possibility if Obama, House Republicans and Senate Democrats can’t find common ground on the bill to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year – and especially if they can’t agree on spending levels for a short-term extension to buy them some time.

The amendments won’t become law, as they’re written now, because they won’t get through the Democratic Senate. But they’ll be powerful bargaining chips when the House negotiates the final spending bill with the Senate — and probably with the administration, since Obama would have to sign it into law.

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